A typical voice activated dialing session involving a wireless or a landline terminal is normally initiated when the VAD subscriber at the terminal requests VAD services during its interaction with a serving Mobile switching Center (MSC). The serving MSC recognizes the request for voice processing and through signaling and control establishes a voice connection between a VAD server and the subscriber. Once the voice connection is established, the subscriber is prompted by the VAD server to give the name or number of the party with whom a connection is requested. The user utters the name or number of the party and the sound signal is relayed over the voice connection to the VAD server. The VAD server processes the spoken utterance by invoking a speech recognition layer which provides a transcription of the utterance, That transcription is then used to locate an entry in a database by mapping a global set of transcriptions that the user is susceptible to utter with corresponding telephone numbers. In a specific example, the user may say "Office" in response to the prompt issued by the VAD server. When valid speech is detected on the line, the VAD server invokes the speech recognition layer that processes the speech signal and determines that the user said "Office". The VAD then searches a database for that particular user to locate the entry "Office" and extract the telephone number associated with this entry. Once this information is found, the VAD server initiates a call session set-up process toward the location sought by the user by dialing the telephone number found in its database. The call session set-up may be effected through the MSC or through another switch in the network. Once the dialing process is completed and the call session is established the user can communicate with the called party through the voice connection passing through the VAD server. In fact, the VAD server becomes a link of the communication pathway through the network between the user and the called party. This is undesirable because during the entire duration of the call session, some resources of the VAD server cannot be used to service other subscribers. In addition, this prior art technique overrides any imposed user restrictions that may be placed in the user profile database on the MSC. Since call session completion toward the called party is effected without intervention from the MSC, the user profile database that may reside on the MSC and that contains information regarding the preferences or restrictions that the user has during his/her use of the network are not implemented. In a specific example, if the user profile is set up to preclude long distance calls, this restriction cannot be enforced when the VAD server dials the called party since the VAD server has no knowledge of the user profile data.
During the process described above, the MSC normally creates billing records to keep track of the usage made by the user of the communications network so the telephone company can bill the user accordingly. Existing billing practices are set-up such that the user is not charged for the cost of the call session involving the VAD services. This implies that the telephone company must filter the billing records to identify those during which the VAD has been invoked and alter them to remove the component relating to the VAD interaction. This task may not be easy to perform and considerable resources must be devoted to properly track and filter the billing records.
Thus, there exists a need in the industry to provide a method and an apparatus for providing voice assisted services that alleviate the problems associated with prior art devices.